Fading Gigalo

The rancid Fading Gigolo sleazily postulates that the beautiful and lonely female professionals of modern-day New York crave only one thing: 57-year-old John Turturro. But here's the joke: there's no joke, that's the movie. Turturro plays cash-strapped handyman Fioravante, who is whored out sight unseen to a married but sexually frustrated doctor played by Sharon Stone, a scene that culminates with Stone literally cursing her husband while she climaxes. Writer-director Turturro begs for comparisons to Woody Allen's classic New York romances, right down to the casting of Allen as Fioravante's mentor and aspiring pimp, but he earns them only in that Fading Gigolo seems to exist in an Allen-esque, pre-feminist 1960s fantasia bursting with polymorphous-perverse female neurotics. After going psychotically over-the-top in nearly every role for the last 15 years, Turturro takes a polar opposite approach here, barely registering as a screen presence.